Wednesday, August 09, 2017

The impending release of a key government report on climate change will force President Trump to choose between accepting the conclusions of his administration’s scientists and the demands of his conservative supporters, who remain deeply unconvinced that humans are the cause of the planet’s warming.

A White House official said on Tuesday that it was still reviewing the draft document that was written by scientists, some of whom have said they fear Mr. Trump will seek to bury it or alter its contents before it is formally released. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said the administration would not comment on the report before its scheduled release this fall.

Even as the White House this week firmly insists President Donald Trump is determined to seek a second term, a new analysis of polling data shows that he's caught in a three-way political squeeze in the states that tipped the 2016 presidential race, and will likely decide the 2020 contest.

On one front, Trump faces undiminished resistance from minority voters, who opposed him in preponderant numbers last year. On the second, he is confronting a consistent -- and, in many states, precipitous -- decline in support from white-collar white voters, who expressed much more skepticism about him last fall than GOP presidential candidates usually face. From the third direction, Trump's support among working-class whites, while still robust, is receding from its historically elevated peak back toward a level more typical for Republican presidential candidates -- especially in the pivotal Rust Belt states that sealed his victory.

These are among the key conclusions from a new analysis of the state-by-state Trump approval ratings released recently by the Gallup Organization. Those results, based on interviews with 81,155 adults in Gallup nightly tracking polls from January 20 through June 30, found that Trump's overall approval rating had fallen below 50 percent in 33 of the 50 states.

Extending beyond those reported results, Gallup provided me previously unpublished findings that tracked Trump's approval rating in key swing states among three demographic groups: non-whites, whites with at least a four-year college degree, and whites without a four-year degree.

Much, of course, will happen that could reshape the landscape between now and the next presidential election, which the White House this weekend insisted Trump plans to contest amid reports that Vice President Mike Pence and other possible contenders are preparing for the possibility the President might not run.

But these poll results challenge the conclusion that Trump's political base has remained impregnable across the traditionally decisive swing states in presidential politics -- as well as several other states that each side hopes to put into play by 2020. "The implications going forward are fairly problematic," says long-time Republican pollster Glen Bolger. "He doesn't have a lot of room to drop, and yet he is."

It will be interesting to see if the college educated voters suddenly decide that his cretinism is a deal breaker. I'd guess it will all depend on whether the Democrats put up someone they can see as a president next time.